THE INDOMITABLE Bill Viall of Providence recently led me and our sons up Mount Lafayette, in the Franconia Range of New Hampshire. Along the way I dawdled along, botanizing and birding and generally making a pest of myself in Bill’s fast-moving party. A thunderstorm caught us near tree line on the Old Bridle Path so we sprinted to the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Greenleaf Hut to dry off and regroup.

As I came sloshing in the door, I said excitedly, “Bill, I just saw some alpine flowers. This is the season! Check them out.”

“Fred,” explained Bill patiently, “I can sort of understand your interest in birds, trees, bugs, and even rocks, but I draw the line at alpine flowers.” As I was finding out, Bill likes to challenge me physically and intellectually. What answer did I have? Why do alpine flowers matter?

This was on my mind as I trudged out of the hut to stalk the elusive diapensia, a lovely little pincushion of a plant with white flowers. It is hard for most people to get excited about alpine flowers. They are tiny, have no fragrance, are illegal to pick, and confer no direct economic benefit. They are of absolutely no tangible use to humans, but maybe that is the point. Alpine plants live above tree line and some are quite rare.

The only place in the world that the dwarf cinquefoil is found is on the Franconia Range and on Mt. Washington. I found the mountain avens to be common on Mt. Lafayette, but it only lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and a small island off Nova Scotia. Even among the mountains of New England, alpine flowers are growing on their own islands, separated from other suitable habitats by seas of green forest.

As the climate of New England has warmed since the last Ice Age, the alpine flowers have moved.

During the last Ice Age, when to create the moraines that became Block Island, Cuttyhunk, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, much of the continental shelf south of these islands was dry. The land was covered by tundra alpine plants and inhabited by a bestiary of Pleistocene exotics such as woolly mammoths. When the glaciers retreated, the alpine flowers followed the ice back up to northern New England.

Eventually, clement weather pushed the forests up the side of the White Mountains, with the alpine flowers only finding refuge over 4,000 feet, near the tops of the peaks. Alpine botanist Doug Weihrauch, of the AMC, explained to me that this movement of alpine plants was very slow. After the ice retreated “for a few thousand years, this arctic-alpine tundra vegetation was the dominant vegetation covering nearly all of New England. So hiking above tree line into one of the few remaining islands of alpine plants is like walking into a museum of New England’s vegetational past.” Unfortunately, without the woolly mammoths.

Will global warming push alpine plants still more, eventually leading to their extinction as they run out of vertical real estate? Certainly natural warming since early biblical times, when large parts of what are now the Sahara and Gobi deserts were green, could cause this to gradually happen. But a more important question is whether man-made effects will change the climate so fast that alpine plants will not even be able to survive in the short term.

Weihrauch is running a study for the AMC called the Mountain Watch plant monitoring program that has mobilized volunteers to pinpoint the blooming time of alpine flowers and track any changes. Although this program has only run for five years, Doug hopes to use historical records to map statistically significant trends.

But there is more to alpine flowers than climate indicators. I have not fully answered the question: Why do alpine flowers matter? If this were the 17th, 18th, or 19th Century this question would not even come up; it would be obvious, for these were the days of the “natural philosophers.” By today’s standards they would be considered eccentric collectors, but in their time they were rightfully considered scientific pioneers. Compared to the humble species sought after then, alpine flowers would be considered glamorous, the rock stars of the natural world.

These were the days when a new barnacle species could excite comments by Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Society of London, and the greatest of the all the natural philosophers, Charles Darwin, spent years studying earthworms (and even wrote a book on them). What has happened to the glorious collectors of past centuries who used to swarm over the globe in search of nature’s most obscure species? They are still with us, but the public barely pays attention.

Instead, the media and the Internet have had, as nature writer David Quammen noted, a homogenizing effect on humanity, dictating what is fashionable and what is, well, dorky. As Quammen wrote, the visionary Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) wrote a book, suppressed by the Catholic Church, called The Phenomenon of Man, in which he projects a time when the entire human population would be joined in a collective consciousness called the noösphere. Although Teilhard is a hero to Internet pioneers, Quammen asks us to reject the noösphere and embrace the different, the obscure, the out-of-fashion, and even the lowly earthworm.

Collecting and cataloging various plants and animals is called descriptive natural history, and it is still relevant today. The pre-eminent descriptive natural historian of our time might be “The Ant Man of Harvard,” E O. Wilson, yet he had to fight for his collections. When Nobel Laureate James D. Watson, co-discoverer, with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA, became the head of the biology department at Harvard, he sneered at Wilson, calling him and like-minded biologists nothing more than stamp collectors. E.O. Wilson called Watson the most unpleasant person he had ever met, the “Caligula” of the biology department. Yet in time it was Wilson and others, using natural-history collections as a foundation, who made some of the most profound evolutionary and ecological discoveries of our time. So descriptive natural history still matters, and so do alpine flowers.

So where are the natural-history stamp collectors among today’s youth? When E.O. Wilson was a bespectacled, nerdy boy, growing up in Alabama, his extensive (almost 40 species) and rather dicey live-snake collection earned him respect among his classmates and helped launch his career in biology. Wilson noted that all kids go through a “Bug Period” (he never grew out of it), but these tendencies are no longer nurtured.

These days the attraction of video games, the Internet, and television have pushed the natural world aside. I have had a hard time finding a single beetle or butterfly collection among my friends’ children, but it’s not the children’s fault. Without parental support and interest in the natural world, a child will grow up without being able to distinguish between the computer screen and reality. Wilson correctly notes that it is not enough to take children on nature walks along paved paths with neat little signs for each plant; children need to get their knees dirty, wade through a pond, bring home a frog or snake, list some species, count birds, take photographs, or start bug collections.

It is not too late to see alpine flowers. Doug Weihrauch noted that the flowering peaks in early June and again in mid-July. The best place to view alpine flowers is on the approaches to Mount Washington, such as Tuckerman’s Ravine, the Alpine Garden and around Lakes of the Clouds Hut. Additionally, alpine flowers can be found on Franconia Ridge, especially near Mount Lafayette.

Be careful not to trample them; you should be able to see quite a few right from the path. Doug noted that the following flowers should be in bloom: mountain avens, alpine bilberry, mountain cranberry, Labrador tea, three-toothed cinquefoil, Cutler’s goldenrod and mountain sandwort.

And what is the final reason why alpine flowers matter? Because they are fun. While Bill and the boys trudged to the top of Mount Lafayette, I chased obscure plants with my camera while being serenaded by Bicknell’s thrush amidst the spectacular sights of a clearing storm in the mountains. It does not get any better than that, at least for those of us who have escaped the noösphere.

Frederick Thurber is a part-time nature writer who lives in South Dartmouth ( frederick.thurber@gmail.com).